The FINANCIAL — Score, a leader in measuring the digital world, reported holiday season retail e-commerce spending for the first 46 days of the November – December 2011 holiday season.
For the holiday season-to-date, $30.9 billion has been spent online, marking a 15-percent increase versus the corresponding days last year. The most recent work week saw four individual days surpass $1 billion in spending, led by Green Monday with $1.13 billion and Free Shipping Day with $1.07 billion. With the heaviest portion of the season behind us, Cyber Monday appears likely to rank as the heaviest online spending day of the year for the second consecutive season.
Further analysis of retail e-commerce spending trends suggests that holiday deals, such as discounts and free shipping, may have been frontloaded during the earlier portion of the season. We analyzed the year-over-year growth rates for the Mondays and Fridays, which represent the majority of the key promotional days for the season, between Thanksgiving and Free Shipping Day.
The results showed significantly higher growth rates during the days nearer to Thanksgiving, with growth rates in the mid-20s, and more modest growth rates in the teens in the middle part of December.comScore’s analysis of e-commerce transactions including free shipping indicated that following a decline in the second week of December, free shipping rebounded during this most recent week, which concluded with Free Shipping Day.
Each week of the online holiday season-to-date has seen free shipping occur on at least half of all transactions. For the five-day week ending with Free Shipping Day, the percentage of transactions with free shipping reached 56 percent, nearly 4 percentage points higher than the corresponding time period last year.
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